This article is a perspective on some important developments in semantics and in computational linguistics over the past forty years. It reviews two lines of research that lie at opposite ends of the field: semantics and morphology. The semantic part deals with issues from the 1970s such as discourse referents, implicative verbs, presuppositions , and questions . The second part presents a brief history of the application of finite-state transducers to linguistic analysis starting with the advent of two-level morphology in the early 1980s and culminating in successful commercial applications in the 1990s. It offers some commentary on the relationship, or the lack thereof, between computational and paper-and-pencil linguistics. The final section returns to the semantic issues and their application to currently popular tasks such as textual inference and question answering.

This article offers a personal perspective on the development of language and information processing over the last half century, focusing on the use of statistical methods. Introduced, with computers, in the 1950s, these have not always been highly regarded, but were revived in the 1990s. They have proved effective in more ways than might have been expected, and encourage new thinking about what language and information processing involve.